Race To Witch Mountain director Andy Fickman is striking while the iron is hot.
Last week, with his new movie riding high at no. 1 in the US, the affable Fickman was announced as the director of big-budget Disney flick, Monster Attack Network. And today he added **Gimme A Call **to his ever-growing to-do list.
Based on a forthcoming teen novel by Sarah Mylnowski, **Gimme A Call **has a high-concept hook: it’s about a high school senior who drops her mobile phone down the bog. When she retrieves it, she finds she can only call herself. The fourteen year-old version of herself, to be precise.
We like Fickman a lot, and** Race To Witch Mountain** is good, clean family fun – but we can’t say that we’re head over heels about this premise, which feels a bit like reheated leftovers of movies like Big, Back To The Future and even frickin’ Frequency.
But Fickman, who has an eleven year-old daughter, seems to feel a real connection to the material, so the benefit of the doubt has been truly given here. He took the project around several different studios, before teaming with Paramount, meaning that the film, if and when it gets made, will be his first non-Disney project for a while.
However, he hasn’t yet decided what his next directorial project will be, with a bunch of projects, including Pool Rats and, potentially, Jonny Quest, vying for attention. But when he gets around to Gimme A Call, he’ll also produce, along with Betsy Sullenger, his partner in the fantastically-monikered company, Oops Doughnuts.